Month: February 2015

So why use a TV for PC monitor you ask? I fall into the “because I can” category. I upgraded my lounge from a cheap Soniq to an LG 3D Smart TV, and so I had a TV sitting around collecting dust.

Motivation to reuse the TV came while I was mid-DIY office renovating. I figured I’d wall mount my 27″ AOC and decided to get a longer wall mount for “future proofing” should I upgrade the screen. I used the Soniq’s size (which is 46″ in diagonal size, 40″ screen) as the template for position given it’s larger size, once it was on the wall though, I couldn’t resist leaving it to see how looked at the end with all the bench-tops in place.

Once the TV wall-mount was secured into place, all cables neatly aligned and bench-top placed back into position. I hung the screen to the wall plugged it in and took a step back bask in my achievement … I burst out laughing, it was a ridiculous sight to see at first, but I quickly started to geek-out at it.

Anyone who has ever plugged a TV into PC, will tell you there are two main issues.

Overscan.

Poor text quality.

If you want to use your TV as a PC monitor whether it’s for HTPC, Gaming rig or just because cause you can, then depending on the TV, you may not have an obvious way to disable overscan. In my case, my TV is a Soniq 40″ E40Z10A-NZ which falls into the category of non-obvious method as there is no option in the TV menu.

Fortunately after a little digging, I found the factory menu code for my Soniq LED TV.

Press “Source”, then enter 200912

Once in, I was able to select and adjust the Overscan values to Zero and retire GPU based scaling. 🙂

Now if I can just get text to look a lot less shit …

Update: Switching to VGA solved this problem and also supports wake-up. HDMI on the other hand, the monitor goes to sleep but won’t wake up.